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We played from 1st to 33rd level at which point we had all the pieces in place to halt and reverse an inter-dimensional invasion. That required a literal Deux Ex Machina where Ao (this was Forgotten Realms, of course) retrieved our dying souls so he could grant us diety ranks to defeat the invading dieties (who had just killed the party). We probably did the diety thing wrong because we first added 20 HD of outsider to each character because that was implied by the DDG rules. I'm not sure if we should have (or if it really mattered). In any case, there was a big battle to end the campaign and afterward the party was granded lesser diety status and given portfolios and that whole deal. And then the next week we were all playing 1st level characters again. Wow, was that a necksnapper!
Two amusing sidebars: I nearly screwed the whole thing up by escaping the required TPK alive.
And, I've heard one of the players wants to revive that campaign, bring the dieties together for a 3-5 session "adventure". I think he's nuts (he's not one of the original DMs to the campaign) but hey if he can make it interesting, I'm there.
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Down on the list: seemingly real close to releasing a notebook essential. It's in layout! Has been for months now. (Just nod politely so I won't cry about this.)
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While I ran the occasional Epic one-shot or mini-campaign (mainly to let people do things like polymorph all their enemies into eternally charmed dire tigers), I have to say that the most 'overpowered' campaign I ran was my final sendoff to 3rd Edition.
It was a Planescape game, ran from levels 11-18... and I basically just said, "Anything goes." Anything short of actual infinite loop combos was fair game, from the most zany stuff in Dragon to the most broken stuff in the splatbooks. I let people go as ridiculous as they wanted, both in concepts and mechanics... and so they did.
All the characters were over the top in some fashion - we had an undead exalted wizard, a mutant knight/cleric/chameleon who could do just about anything, two warlocks (one a half-minotaur, the other a petal faerie), and one character who I can't remember their actual race, since they spent all their time shapechanged into a time warping epic bird thing.
But two characters really took the cake.
The first, 'Polly', was some sort of feral monk half-minotaur anthropomorphic pouncing something. I'm not really sure. All that matters is that he had something like 17 attacks on the charge, and enchantments to make all his natural weapons count as insanely oversized, so that they each did 12d6 damage. His full-round attacks involved literally hundreds of dice.
The only character whose turn took longer was our Psion. Through a variety of tricks, he would take several full rounds - his own, one for a portion of his mind he split off, one for his psi-crystal, etc. Each one typically involved throwing around some complicated power that typically either killed an enemy, or did nothing at all. And once he had done all of that, he would typically be disatisfied with his turn... and use another cheap psychic power to rewind time to the start of his turn, and try it all over again - typically with equally ineffective results. He would spend a half-hour rolling dice in order to 15 damage to one enemy. Watching his character in action was more like viewing some bizarre piece of expressionist art, rather than actually watching someone playing a game.
This wasn't a sustainable game, by any means, but it gave everyone the chance to really take whatever absurd concept had occured to them, and see what it meant in play. By the end of the game, I was basically making up how the encounters worked as we went along. The characters paraded from Sigil to Eberron to Faerie to the Far Realms to Hyrule to Celestia, confronted Abominations, Elder Evils, Deities - even faced off with the likes of Drizzt, Raistlin and Elminster - and the plot of the game itself centered around the universe rewriting itself into a new edition. It was absurdity piled upon absurdity, with no pretense of balance or stability or reason.
It was an absolutely brilliant amount of fun that we all thoroughly enjoyed - and promptly swore we would never play anything like it ever again.
I played in a longtime campaign converting an old 2e character to 3e and took him from 7th (3.0) to 17th (3.5). Power level was decent but his eldritch knight build only really competed with the other characters in the party (druid/warshifter/nature's champion, straight fighter (archer build), cleric/fighter, paladin/custom prc, arcane trickster/archmage) when it came to style, roleplaying, and knowledge aspects of the game.
That same 2e character in an earlier incarnation went to 20th level in a 1e game. In there I was much more high powered, with a godly int, permanent mind blank, and 20th level wizard powers paling next to what I did as the world's foremost merchant prince who dealt with rulers, gods, and dragons.
I met a guy on a train once who described his D&D game.
They where using 1st Edition and they had been the same game for nearly 20 years. All the PC's had been 20 level magic users, fighters, and clerics (I think) they had destroyed about 4 countries (worlds?) and they were about 5 - 6 levels away before being able to take on the big bad god.
It was an odd conversation, on the one hand I had to admire his ability to game once a week for about 20 years and have a truely epic storyline. On the otherhand in order to accomplish that, you have to invent so many new rules into the game, that they were not playing D&D anymore, which means that the shared community aspect of D&D is essentially gone (in my opinion at least).
Oh as for me I have played 1-4th level and a 6th level character.
The long answer is heck yes. I once played in a campaign that started at level twenty one and ended at level forty. Much hilarity was had dungeons where leveled, Bill Gates and Asmodeous got spanked for trying to end the multiverse, Sigil got nuked. Good times with 7-9 people.
I have ran several games where the characters got pretty epic. One from level 1-26 or so with 3 people that lasted about a year. Cutting swathes through all of Eberrons problems one d20 roll at a time.
Another game I ran was mucho fun. Gestalt level 1-35 where we would play for about twelve hours during the weekend with 8-12! people. OH lordy! I have never racked my brain or laughed so hard in several years. The characters where all insane from the get go and just got worse. The ultimate psion with nearly limitless power, the berserker whose rage shattered cities, the sneakiest rogue I never did see, the evangelical voice of the silver flame laying waste to the wicked, his smarter better half monk protector leading thier people to salvation, just to name a few. Ah great times.
I played 40th level characters before. But we were far from the most powerful beings around. It was an incredibly epic game, my main character was a level 20/20 sorcerer/monk. He was ridiculous, but I still got worked every combat.
The DM (who used to post here under the name of SHARK) ran a big epic world. In our game, our mission to was seize a vast mountain fortress defended by hordes of very powerful enemies. Our party was composed of about 20 characters, most were NPC henchmen and followers under the control of the players.
In one fight, we fought a large number of fire giants, each with at least 16 levels of fighter and each wearing more magical bling than we were. It was epic.
One we got past them, we fought multiple winter wights. And if you know anything about winter wights, you know how ridiculous even one normally is. 40th level or not, those guys were freaking tough!
The DM did a fantastic job of maintaining that balance between allowing you to be this epic hero that could level mountains, a demigod on par with Hercules, but also was able to challenge you by ramping up the world such that there were plenty of enemies and monsters tougher than you were. The main big bad guy of the campaign was an 80th level vampire lord who ruled a vast continent sized nation of tens of millions, and who fielded endless legions of undead and monsters in his bid for world conquest.
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